A Little History of Poetry

A Little History of Poetry

by John Carey
A Little History of Poetry

A Little History of Poetry

by John Carey

Paperback

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Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

It's always the perfect time to read a little history of poetry — and John Carey’s book is exactly that. It will make you wonder, with smile and heart, why EVERY month isn’t National Poetry Month. Which is to say — it’s PERFECT for any season! The most fun classroom you could keep handy.

A vital, engaging, and hugely enjoyable guide to poetry, from ancient times to the present, by one of our greatest champions of literature—selected as the literature book of the year by the London Times
 
“[A] fizzing, exhilarating book.”—Sebastian Faulks, Sunday Times, London

“Delightful.’”—New York Times Book Review
 
What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work—over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. But this Little History is about some that have not.
 
John Carey tells the stories behind the world’s greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago to those being written today. Carey looks at poets whose works shape our views of the world, such as Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Yeats. He also looks at more recent poets, like Derek Walcott, Marianne Moore, and Maya Angelou, who have started to question what makes a poem “great” in the first place.
 
For readers both young and old, this little history shines a light for readers on the richness of the world’s poems—and the elusive quality that makes them all the more enticing.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780300255034
Publisher: Yale University Press
Publication date: 03/09/2021
Series: Little Histories
Pages: 320
Sales rank: 508,812
Product dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

About The Author
John Carey is emeritus professor at Oxford. His books include The Essential Paradise Lost, What Good Are the Arts?, studies of Donne and Dickens, and a biography of William Golding. The Unexpected Professor, his memoir, was a Sunday Times best-seller.

Table of Contents

1 Gods, Heroes and Monsters: The Epic of Gilgamesh 1

2 War, Adventure, Love Homer Sappho 7

3 Latin Classics Virgil Horace Ovid Catullus Juvenal 13

4 Anglo-Saxon Poetry Beowulf Laments Riddles 19

5 Continental Masters of the Middle Ages Dante Daniel Petrarch Villon 25

6 A European Poet Chaucer 31

7 Poets of the Seen World and the Unseen The Gawain Poet Hafez Langland 37

8 Tudor Court Poets Skelton Wyatt Surrey Spenser 43

9 Elizabethan Love Poets Shakespeare Marlowe Sidney 50

10 Copernicus in Poetry John Donne 58

11 An Age of Individualism Jonson Herrick Marvell 65

12 Religious Individualists Herbert Vaughan Traherne 74

13 Poetry from the World Beyond John Milton 83

14 The Augustan Age Dryden Pope Swift Johnson Goldsmith 91

15 The Other Eighteenth Century Montagu Egerton Finch Tollet Leapor Yearsley Barbauld Blamire Baillie Wheatley Duck Clare Thomson Cowper Crabbe Gray Smart 98

16 Communal Poetry Popular Ballads Hymns 105

17 Lyrical Ballads, and After Wordsworth Coleridge 112

18 Second-Generation Romantics Keats Shelley 120

19 Romantic Eccentrics Blake Byron Burns 128

20 From Romanticism to Modernism in German Poetry Goethe Heine Rilke 137

21 Making Russian Literature Pushkin Lermontov 145

22 Great Victorians Tennyson Browning Clough Arnold 152

23 Reform, Resolve and Religion: Victorian Women Poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning Emily Brontë Christina Rossetti 160

24 American Revolutionaries Walt Whitman Emily Dickinson 168

25 Shaking the Foundations Baudelaire Mallarmé Verlaine Rimbaud Valéry Dylan Thomas Edward Lear Charles Dodgson Swinburne Katharine Harris Bradley Edith Emma Cooper Charlotte Mew Oscar Wilde 177

26 New Voices at the End of an Era Hardy Housman Kipling Hopkins 184

27 The Georgian Poets Edward Thomas Robert Frost Rupert Brooke Walter de la Mare W.H. Davies G.K. Chesterton Hilaire Belloc W.W. Gibson Robert Graves D.H. Lawrence 192

28 Poetry of the First World War Stadler Toller Grenfell Sassoon Owen Rosenberg Gurney Cole Cannan Sinclair McCrae 200

29 The Great Escapist W.B. Yeats 208

30 Inventing Modernism Eliot Pound 215

31 West Meets East Waley Pound The Imagists 222

32 American Modernists Wallace Stevens Hart Crane William Carlos Williams Esther Popel Helene Johnson Alice Dunbar-Nelson Jessie Redmon Fauset Angelina Weld Grimké Claude McKay Langston Hughes 230

33 Getting Over Modernism Marianne Moore Elizabeth Bishop 239

34 The Thirties Poets Auden Spender MacNeice 247

35 Poetry of the Second World War Douglas Lewis Keyes Fuller Ross Causley Reed Simpson Shapiro Wilbur Jarrell Pudney Ewart Sitwell Feinstein Stanley-Wrench Clark 255

36 American Confessional Poets, and Others Lowell Berryman Snodgrass Sexton Roethke 262

37 The Movement Poets and Associates Larkin Enright Jennings Gunn Betjeman Stevie Smith 269

38 Fatal Attractions Hughes Plath 276

39 Poets in Politics Tagore Akhmatova Mandelstam Mayakovsky Brodsky Lorca Neruda Paz Seferis Seifert Herbert MacDiarmid R.S. Thomas Amichai 282

40 Poets Who Cross Boundaries Heaney Walcott Angelou Oliver Murray 289

Acknowledgements 296

Index 305

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